Robot Vision System with Gray-Scale Image and Range Image for the Outdoor Electricity Distribution Work

This paper describes the practical application of robot vision techniques to electricity distribution works. To cope with difficult outdoor lighting conditions together with various background scene caused by a wide variation of the working environment structures, we have developed two methods of detection of an object using both 2-D gray-scale image and 3-D range image. The first method finds an object of interest in a 2-D image taken from a rather far position. Although a 3-D range image taken from the same position has too low resolution to extract surface geometry of the object, it is effectively used to eliminate the background scene from the 2-D image based on the distance threshold. The second method generates online template image of an object to be manipulated. This enables reliable real time visual tracking by stereo vision in the presence of variation of shape and appearance of the object. We show how these methods are implemented and effectively used in the distribution work.